Solid Doctor Repairs CAD Data

By Anthony J. Lockwood

As part of the recent releases of its PowerSHAPE CAD solution and the CopyCAD Pro reverse engineering program, Delcam (Birmingham, United Kingdom) has launched Solid Doctor for repairing translated CAD models. Both PowerSHAPE and CopyCAD Pro now incorporate Siemens PLM Software’s Parasolid geometric modeling component, which, when combined with Delcam s existing tools, enable Solid Doctor to read in and repair models from such sources as IGES and native CATIA files as well as output a Parasolid XT file that can be read directly into all Parasolid-based applications, including IronCAD, Solid Edge, SolidWorks, and NX.

Delcam describes Solid Doctor as a major step toward true interoperability with many popular CAD systems. The company notes that Parasolid is the component-modeling engine leveraged by more CAD applications than any other and that systems such as Autodesk Inventor and PTC s Pro/ENGINEER have import/export filters for the Parasolid XT file format.

Solid Doctor is said to allow you to repair common problems encountered when translating low-precision and incomplete data, including gaps and overlaps between surfaces or duplicated and missing surfaces. With it, you can generate a valid, high-precision Parasolid model.

Solid Doctor melds the automatic data repair tools supplied by Parasolid with the surface creation and editing options available in PowerSHAPE. This combination reportedly means that you can make simple repairs quickly and easily, and cope with more complex problems by deleting and replacing the existing surfaces within the model with a simple manual process.

Solid Doctor works by first analyzing a model using Parasolid’s checking mechanisms to determine the extent of any inconsistencies in topology or geometry. It divides these issues into categories, such as Gap or Hole, locating, labeling, and color-coding the inconsistencies accordingly. Solid Doctor then recommends the most appropriate course of action, including a possible automatic fix. The latter uses a combination of the healing technology in Parasolid as well as some Delcam tools to correct surfaces that, for example, have had their orientation reversed. Since each automatically corrected problem is labeled, you can inspect the repair and determine if you need to take further action.

Solid Doctor also provides Delcam s trim region editing tools for manually correcting complex issues such as mismatches between the edges of the various surfaces within the model. PowerSHAPE s Smart Surfacing technology can also be brought into the repair of tougher problems. Approved repairs are automatically incorporated back into the Parasolid model, eventually resulting in a valid Parasolid.